GARRETT
Today was their triumph. They walked on roses, all the way up from the sea.
Red roses, thrown down thick across every foot of the road from the harbor to the holy hill, so that three thousand men marched on a carpet of them and crushed them underfoot and left the whole city smelling of the crush.
Red for the fallen, the septas said. A multitude for every man who did not come home. They had done their best, and the road ran red from the water to the sept, and Garrett walked it and did not look too long at the roses, because he knew what they were and what they represented.
Garrett had not thought to live to see such a thing. When the rocks began to fall, he had not thought to live at all.
He had been a tanner's son from the mud lanes under the Hill of Rhaenys. Before the black island he had been no one in particular. Now he walked up the spine of King's Landing in cloth of purple and gold with a crown of flowers slipping down over one ear, and the whole city screamed for him.
The noise got into his chest and settled there. Drowning out the beating of his heart and replacing it with the love and passion of the king's city.
Horns from the walls, long and blaring. Drums under the horns, on the rooftops and in the windows, a heartbeat the size of the city. And over all of it the bells of Baelor's Sept, ringing without let, until the air itself seemed to shake.
The people packed the road ten and twenty deep, hung from the windows, clung to the statues and the walls. They threw flowers. They reached out to touch the marked men as they passed, quick, as you'd touch a holy relic and draw your hand back.
Mummers went before the column of peerless scarred. Tumblers on their hands, dancing girls trailing ribbons, a fire-breather who sent up gouts of flame to make the children scream, a moth-eaten bear in a golden collar shuffling on its hind legs.
Behind the three thousand came the lords of the realm, for the king had summoned them from every corner of the Seven Kingdoms to witness this day, and their banners had crowded the harbor thick as a forest.
Garrett had names for perhaps one in ten.
A girl in a blue dress darted out of the crowd, caught his face in both hands, kissed him on the mouth, and was gone before he could blink. The men around him howled and pounded his back. It happened up and down the column the whole way—girls running out to kiss the peerless, and no septa scolding them for it today.
Off to the left some drunken prentices were bawling a song about what the marked men had really been at on Dragonstone, and it was filthy and it named body parts a septon would blush at, and Garrett laughed till his side hurt.
It was good to laugh. He had not been sure he would ever want to again.
The septas lined the road in their white. As the men passed they came out to bless them—a thumb dipped in sweet oil, the seven-pointed star drawn on the brow, a flower crown pressed down on the head.
Blessed. You are blessed of the Seven. You walked the long night and were brought home and spared by the seven's will and king Joffrey's love.
Garrett bowed his head for it like the rest, and the old woman's thumb drew the star over the scar under his eye, and he did not know why his throat kept closing.
He had not understood, at the start, why the king troubled with any of it.
It was a great deal, for three thousand, quite a few of which were common men. The roses and the horns, the summoned lords, the purple and gold, a whole city made to fast and pray and now to feast and throw flowers—for knights and tanners' sons and fishermen and Flea Bottom rats who had done no more than live through a thing they'd been ordered into.
Kings did not do such things. Kings did not hold ceremonies for the men he had sent to war instead of celebrating his own fifteenth name day.
This one did. That was the difference, and every marked man knew it, and it had changed how they walked.
The king had bled for them. It was told everywhere now, ship to ship, tavern to tavern and beyond. At the behest of the high septon, members of the faith had been sent out to proclaim the truth, the power of the seven and beloved king Joffrey all throughout the realm. How the good king had dropped senseless the same hour the mountain broke, and lain like a dead man for days with blood weeping from his eyes, and no maester able to name the cause.
They said he had felt it. Every blow, every death, a hundred leagues off across the water—felt it in his own body, and near died of it. They said that when he woke, before any ship made port, he had known the number. Three thousand and seventy. As if the gods had leaned down and told him in his sleep how many of his men were left alive.
Garrett believed it. It was easier to believe than not, when you had heard the voice yourself.
He remembered the beach, in the hour they were all breaking, the king's voice had come warm into his skull, and it had said his name.
Garrett. A tanner's son. The king had known him in the black of that night and called him by name. You did not forget a thing like that. It sat in a man differently than the loyalty he owed a lord.
As the procession waded through the streets, the joy was real. Only there was something under it, that made it more real than any of the songs would be able to capture.
Three thousand marched now where ten thousand had sailed. Seven men in every ten were not here—ash on the black sand, or crumbled to grit with the stone things, or gone into the fog that Garrett did not let himself think on.
Red roses underfoot for all the men killed and blood spilt so that the seven kingdoms could live free from the demon and his red witch.
Hobb was one of them.
Hobb had been a fishmonger's boy, his best friend from the same mud lanes, and they'd sailed together laughing about the glory they'd win, two nobodies who'd never held anything sharper than a gutting knife.
On the second hour a stone man came at Garrett's blind side with a fist like a millstone, and Hobb saw it, and shoved him clear, and took it himself.
Garrett had not been able to stop and think. There was no stopping on that beach. He'd killed the thing and moved on and left Hobb where he lay, and he'd hated himself for it every hour since, and he knew Hobb would have called him a fool for the hating.
That did not help much.
You'd have liked this, he told him, walking the roses. The girls. The wine after. It ought to be you up here, not me.
But the king had not forgotten Hobb, and that was the thing Garrett held to. At the end of this day the High Septon would stand on the steps and read the names. All of them—near seven thousand, each one spoken aloud before the gods and the whole city.
And it would be done again next year, and the year after, on the day they had set sail, for as long as the city stood. The king had sworn it on the pier, weeks past.
Hobb, a fishmonger's boy no one would have missed, would have his name read from the steps of Baelor a hundred years after he was dust. Being remembered was its own kind of not-dying, the septons said. Garrett hoped they had the right of it. The dead deserved that much at least.
Three men rode at the head of the whole procession in celebration of their triumph. Only three; no one else was mounted.
Lord Renly in the middle, the king's uncle, splendid and laughing. Old Lord Redwyne on his right, grizzled and sour-faced in the sun. And on his left, the dark one. Ser Jon.
Lightbringer.
Garrett's eye kept going to him the whole way up, as others did as well. He had stood on that black shore and watched the dark lord go through the stone men with the other knights, never tiring, never touched, the white wolf at his heel, and at the end the pale fire waking in his fist as he drove the dagger through the witch and the night broke and the dawn came up clean.
Garrett had seen that. And even with the memory clear in his mind it seemed like something out of the legends the matron used to read him as a boy.
Some of the men believed the gods had put a hand on Lightbringer that night. Others believed it was king Joffrey. But all knew it was something. For no living man cut down shadows with a sword of white fire, and so it must have been more than a man doing it.
The Warrior himself, they whispered, come down into a man's skin for the one long night, the way the Seven were said to walk among men in the oldest tales. Garrett did not know about such things. He knew what he had watched Ser Jon do, and he was not sure any other on that beach could have done it. If that was not a god's hand, he did not know what a god was for.
The dark lord rode at the front on a black courser, grave and stiff, looking like a man who'd sooner be scrubbing a stable than sat up there with the whole city loving him.
In the ruin of the courtyard, at the last, a gargoyle had come down on Garrett out of the smoke, and Ser Jon had been there between one breath and the next, and taken its wing off, and moved on, and never knew whose life he'd saved.
Garrett had never thanked him. He supposed he never would. But it would have to be enough to walk the same road, and be wed in brotherhood by the scar they shared.
The rose road ended at the marble steps, and at the top of them stood the king.
King Joffrey, the beautiful, the golden, pale yet from his long sleep, but standing straight in the sun with the High Septon beside him in his crystal crown and the great doors of the sept at his back.
The three thousand filled the plaza below. The lords stood ranked to either side. The smallfolk packed every other space there was. And the bells stopped so that a hush dropped over the whole throng like a cloak thrown over a cage.
The king knelt.
He went down on his knees before the High Septon, on the steps, and bowed his golden head for the blessing—the old man's hands on his brow, the oil, the words. A low sound moved through the crowd at the sight of it. Here was the greatest man in the world down on his knees like any beggar.
The young king they all loved, and who loved them so, he almost gave his life for theirs. Watching him, Garrett felt he could withstand a thousand long nights, though he wished to never see its like again.
When Joffrey rose, the roar shook the flowers in the air.
The three who had ridden dismounted and climbed the steps, and the king blessed them with his own hand, Renly and Redwyne and Lightbringer. Then he turned to the crowd and spoke, and his voice went out clear to the very back of the plaza, as if he'd pitched it at each man alone.
"My lords. My people. My friends." He let it settle. "Look on these men. Three thousand and seventy. Look well, and tell your children you saw them, for there has been no like of them in ten thousand years, and there may be none again." His voice rose. "Ten thousand sailed. They faced horrors and the stone come alive and fire out of the earth and a plague no man could stand against—and they stood. Six thousand nine hundred and thirty died on that shore so the dark would never reach your doors. And these three thousand came home through it, marked and blessed and peerless, and there is no honor in my gift, no gold in my vaults, no title in my power that is enough to pay them. But I mean to spend the rest of my reign in the trying."
The roar that came back was a solid thing, a wall of sound. Garrett shouted himself hoarse with the rest of them and did not much care that his face was wet.
The king raised a hand and the plaza quieted, and he called a name up the steps.
"Aurane Waters. Come forward."
The silver-haired man climbed and knelt. Garrett knew him—the Driftmark bastard, who'd smuggled the traitor's letter out and carried the unmarked to safety before the grey could take them.
"You did the crown good service, Aurane" the king said. "The warning you brought. The men you saved. Ask what you will of me."
"Only to serve, Your Grace." The bastard bowed his head. "It is all I ever wished."
"Spoken like a friend to the crown, and the crown does not forget its friends." Joffrey's mouth curved. "Gold I could give you, and you'd spend it. Land, and it could be taken from you. Ships, and you'd see wonders and horrors at sea. Instead, I will give you the one thing gold cannot buy and no enemy can strip away. A name."
The wonder ran through the crowd in a long murmur. The man stayed kneeling a moment with his head bowed, and when he raised it Garrett thought, even at that distance, that his eyes were wet.
Names, Garrett thought. He finds the nameless and gives them names and place to belong. He had been no one; now he was one of the Peerless. The bastard had been no one's son; now he'd be a lord. The king lifted men up.
Then Joffrey turned to the dark lord, and his voice changed—warmer, with something in it that carried plain to every ear. Love, and no shame in it.
"Ser Jon. My good-brother. My shadow. My sword. My friend." He set a hand on Lightbringer's shoulder. "Who walked into the red witch's own hell and cut her down. Who took the head from Stannis Baratheon, the Ash Lord, the Usurper. Who ended the long night with fire in his hand." He looked to the crowd. "There is no man in this realm I owe more, nor trust more, nor love better. Ask what you will, brother. It is yours."
"Only to serve, Your Grace." Jon's voice was quieter, but it carried in the hush. "That is all I wish."
"And serve you have, better than any man living." The hand tightened on Jon's shoulder. "I mean to give you a great deal today, Jon. All of it earned twice over." Then the king's voice changed again, and something in the change lifted the hair on Garrett's arms. "But we stand before the gods' own house, on holy ground, and here a man cannot carry a lie. Not even a king. Least of all a king."
The plaza went still.
"It is a day for reconciliation," the king said. "For the mending of old wounds and the ending of old lies. So let us have a little truth, here, where truth belongs."
A puzzled murmur moved through the throng. Garrett did not follow it. Nor did the men around him; he saw them frowning, glancing at one another.
"You have all heard the songs," Joffrey went on. "How my father, and Jon Arryn, and Lord Stark rose in rebellion because Prince Rhaegar carried off the lady Lyanna Stark. A maiden stolen, a betrothed lord's wrath, a war fought for love of a woman. It makes a fine song." He shook his head. "It is not the truth. The truth is plainer and uglier. The realm rose against a madman. Against a king who imprisoned and murdered noble heirs, who burned Lord Rickard Stark alive and throttled his heir before his eyes, and then called for the heads of my father and Eddard Stark, who had done no wrong but be loved too well. Jon Arryn raised his banners because his wards were sentenced to die. Not for a stolen girl. Remember it rightly. The songs lie."
He let that sit. Then, lower:
"But there is a truth in the old song too, and it has been buried near seventeen years, and I will bring it up into the light today, for this is a new beginning and we are done with lies. Lord Eddard Stark. Come forward."
The Hand of the King climbed the marble steps, grey and slow, and Garrett saw that he had gone pale. Pale as the stone under his boots.
"At the war's end," the king said, and his voice carried and carried, "Lord Stark rode south, to the red mountains of Dorne, to a tower where the last of Prince Rhaegar's Kingsguard still kept their watch. And there he found his sister. Lyanna. Dying." The silence was total now; the whole city held its breath. "She had borne a child. Rhaegar's son. And dying, she made her brother swear to hide the boy and keep him safe. And Eddard Stark, who does not break his word, swore it. And kept it. Sixteen years he kept it—took the boy home, and named him bastard, and wore that shame sooner than break his word to a dying woman."
The murmur was climbing now, spreading through the plaza, and Garrett watched the understanding break across the faces around him like a wave going out. Men turned to stare up at the dark lord on the steps. His own heart was slamming. He saw it too. He saw where it went, and could scarce credit it.
"Is it true, my lord?" The king turned to Ned Stark, and gentled his voice, but it still carried. "We stand before the gods and I am your king. I'll ask you plain, and you'll answer plain, for the realm to hear. Is that the truth of it?"
Lord Stark's jaw worked. He looked, a moment, at the dark lord standing a few paces off. Something passed between them that Garrett was too far to read. Then the Hand lifted his grey head, and his voice was rough, but it did not shake.
"It is true," he said. "Every word. On my honor, and before the gods. It is true."
The crowd moved like a wheat field under a hard gust. The king turned to the dark lord, and Garrett held his breath with all the rest.
"And you, ser. Before the gods, in the sight of the realm. Say it once, plain, and you need never say it again." The gold eyes rested on him. "Whose son are you?"
And the dark lord—Lightbringer, who had cut down devils with a sword of fire, who had ended the long night—stood on the steps before the whole staring realm, and lifted his head, and Garrett heard him say it, clear and even, the words rolling out over the breathless city.
"Rhaegar Targaryen was my father."
The world drew one great breath and held it.
And before the murmur could break into a roar, before the realm could make of it whatever it would, the king spoke again, quiet, almost gentle, and yet it carried to the very back of the throng.
"And what is it you wish, cousin?"
And Lightbringer, the Last Dragon's son, answered as he had answered already, and would go on answering all his days.
"Only to serve, Sire."
JON
This is madness, Jon thought, kneeling on the cold stone.
He knelt on the steps of the Great Sept of Baelor with the whole realm watching, the words Rhaegar Targaryen was my father and Only to serve, still hanging in the air over the plaza, and he thought that he had run into battle against stone dragons with a steadier heart than he knelt here now.
A man knew how to die. That was easy to learn. No one had ever taught him how to do this.
The king stood over him, golden in the sun, and beyond the king, the High Septon in his crystal crown, and beyond them both the doors of the sept standing open like a mouth. Below, three thousand marked men and half the lords of the realm and the whole vast breathing city, all of them staring at the bastard, the dragon's son kneeling to the stag.
Madness, he thought again. He had told Joffrey as much, three nights past, and Joffrey had only smiled.
They had taken their supper alone in the king's solar, the two of them, as they often had. Cold capon and good bread and a flagon of Arbor red, and no servants, because Joffrey liked to talk plainly and a plain-talking king wanted no ears in the room.
The fire had burned low. Joffrey had looked thin still, and pale, but his gold eyes were as sharp as they had ever been.
"I mean to legitimize you," the king had said, tearing bread. "You know that much. But I'll do more than that, Jon. On the day of the triumph, before the whole city, I mean to tell them who your father was."
Jon had set down his cup, not sure if his friend was jesting. "That is madness, Your Grace."
"Everyone will likely agree with you." Joffrey seemed unbothered. "My grandfather. Lord Stark. The whole small council. But I am the king, and they are not." He ate the bread. Seeing as his jest did not land, Joff sighed."Say the rest of it. You're bursting."
"It's a needless risk. A reckless one. One we've spoken of before."
"Things have changed."
Jon had leaned forward. "The moment you speak it aloud you can never take it back. You put a dragon into the light, before the whole realm, when it could have stayed hidden forever. Why? What does the crown gain that's worth what it hazards?"
"A great deal, as it happens." Joffrey had smiled, that maddening private smile. "But we'll come to that. There's more you won't like first." He'd refilled Jon's cup unasked. "The same day I name your father, you shall wed our cousin Shireen. On the sept steps. And take the name Baratheon."
Jon had stared at him.
This is madness, he'd thought then, too.
"People of the Seven Kingdoms," the king said now, and his voice rolled out over the hushed plaza. "It is time we put the wars behind us. All of them. The ones just fought and those near two decades past. It is time for old blood to be made new, and old wounds to close."
He turned, and looked down at Jon, and his voice gentled but carried still.
"This man—the last son of Rhaegar, the hero of Dragonstone, the sword that ended the long night—will this day wed my cousin, the lady Shireen, a girl whom I love like a sister. Here. On these steps. Before you all, and before the gods." A murmur, rising. "I will make him trueborn with my own word. He will take the name Baratheon, and be my brother in law as he is my brother in arms. I will make him Lord of Dragonstone, and Lord Paramount of the Narrow Sea." The murmur climbing now. "So long as he swears one oath. Here. Now. Before every god and every man of you."
The king's gold eyes held Jon's.
"That he forsakes, for himself and for every child of his body, unto the end of days, all claim to the Iron Throne that comes to him through Rhaegar Targaryen. That the dragon's blood in him will never reach for a crown again. Swear that, my friend, and all the rest is yours."
Jon lifted his head. He had known the words were coming. He had helped shape them, three nights past, over the cold capon. Still they landed in him like stones dropped in a well.
"I will swear it," he said.
And they brought the lady Shireen up the steps.
"Wed her," Joffrey had said, in the solar, as though he'd asked Jon to pass the salt. "You will of course not touch her. Not until she's a woman grown, and willing, if she's ever willing—that's for the two of you and no one else, and if it's never, then it's never. She'll be your wife in name and your ward in truth, until such time as it changes. But the marriage must be real. Vows before the Seven, witnessed by the realm. It has to be a thing no man can undo."
Jon had turned his cup in his hands and looked at himself in the wine. How had they got here?
"I take it you've spoken to her?" Jon asked. "The girl. Before you settled this between us like a horse-trade."
Something had flickered in Joffrey's face—approval and certainty, Jon thought, though sometimes it was hard to be sure with the king. "I have. Of course I have. I'd not sell her into a marriage without her word any more than I'd sell you into one. I told her what I mean to do, and I told her she could say no, and nothing ill would come of it if she did. That she could remain my ward instead." He'd paused. "She didn't say no. She's frightened, Jon. She's lost everything and everyone, and there's not a soul left in the world she trusts completely—except, as it happens, the man who put his cloak on her when others wanted her dead, and whose wolf sleeps at her door." The gold eyes had been steady. "She trusts you. Gods know why, you can be as grim as a gravestone and not so appealing on the eyes either."
Jon picked up a piece of bread and threw it at him. The king dodged, laughing like a great fool.
"So. Will you have her?"
"I am yours to command," Jon had said slowly. "You know that. You've always known that." He'd frowned. "But I'd know why, first. Not the marriage—I see the marriage. The reveal. Why speak Rhaegar's name at all, when everything else can be done without it? Why hand the realm a dragon it never knew it had?"
Joffrey had leaned back, and laughed softly, and said: "I thought we had been over this. Are you still planning to rebel against me, cousin?"
"Joff. Be serious."
"Be serious, he says." The king had grinned. "I am always serious, Jon. Even when I'm laughing, it's my one redeeming quality." Then the grin had faded, and he'd set his elbows on the table, and told him.
The High Septon married them on the steps of Baelor, in the sight of the Seven and the staring realm.
Shireen stood very small beside Jon, wrapped in a maiden's cloak, a veil of grey silk over her head to hide the bareness beneath it.
Her hand, when the septon bound their hands together with the ribbon, was cold and thin and trembling in his, and Jon closed his fingers around it as gently as he knew how, the way he might have gentled a frightened bird, and felt her grip tighten in answer, small and desperate.
She kept her eyes down through most of it. Once, when the High Septon's voice boomed out over them, she flinched, and glanced up at Jon sidelong, and Jon gave her the smallest nod he could—it's all right, I'm here—and she looked down again and breathed.
She's eleven, he thought, over the septon's droning. She's eleven years old and everyone she ever loved is ash, and here she stands being married before a hundred thousand strangers to the man who killed her father.
It was a grim thing.
He would not pretend to himself that it was not a grim thing. But he thought of the burgeoning hatred he had glimpsed in the men's eyes on Dragonstone, on Driftmark and all the way back here, and he thought that grim as this was, it was kinder than any of the doors that would have opened for her otherwise.
The High Septon bound their hands and named them man and wife, one flesh, one heart, one soul, and bid them speak their vows.
"With this kiss, I pledge my love," Jon said, low, "and take you for my lady wife."
"With this kiss, I pledge my love," Shireen whispered, barely a thread of sound, "and take you for my lord and husband."
She lifted her veil with shaking hands. Jon bent, and kissed her on the cheek, chastely, a brother's kiss, and she rose on her toes and kissed his cheek in turn, quick and light as a moth, and the crowd stamped its feet and clapped politely but with so many of them it came out a roar, and the little girl flinched again at the sound of it and then, hesitantly, seeing the faces below were not hateful, almost smiled.
There, Jon thought, looking at his king. It's done. She's mine to keep safe now, before gods and men.
"It's protection," Joffrey had said, in the solar. "For you and for her both. That's the heart of it."
"Protection." Jon had not troubled to hide his doubt. "You would give me everything, and announce it to every loyalist left breathing, and call it protection."
"Come now, it's just me. No need to pretend to be dull. You're cleverer than you let men see." Joffrey had ticked it off on his fingers, patient as a maester. "The people love you. The men who were on that island half worship you, near as much as they do me."
And hadn't that come as a surprise, one Jon was struggling to get used to.
"Lightbringer, the man who ended the night. You are not cruel or stupid and so that love will continue to grow. Too much of it will be a danger to you. And so sooner or later, whether you wish it or not, some lord with a grievance against me, or just a taste for making kings, will look at the beloved hero, the Lightbringer—"Joffrey brandished the dagger as he spoke, Jon could see the writing on it now that Joff had pointed it out, From my blood comes the Prince— "and think: There's a better crown than the one we have. They'd push you toward the throne whether you reached for it or not. Men have died that way who never wanted the crown at all."
"Which is exactly why revealing my blood is folly," Jon had said. "You will have just made me a thousand times more dangerous. Now I'm not merely the beloved hero. I'm the beloved hero Targaryen hanging atop my head. I'd be Daemon come again. Lady Stark would be having a right laugh."
"That would be true," Joffrey had said, "if I were not marrying you to the demon's daughter."
Jon had gone still.
He'd thought of Shireen then—the men's faces on the ship as they looked at her, the fear and the plain cold hate; the way the crowd on the pier had drawn back from the bald unmarred child; the whispers that followed her everywhere, Witch, Demon, Stannis's blood, she walked out of the fire, the grey went into her and out again.
An innocent, and the realm looked at her as at a thing crawled up from a nightmare.
"Few men in the Seven Kingdoms will rally to a would-be king," Joffrey had said softly, "whose queen would be Shireen Baratheon. Lightbringer or no. The dragon's blood might tempt them. The demon's daughter at your side will cool their ardor wonderfully. I am wedding your claim to the one woman in the realm no one will follow. That is the protection—for you. No one will make you a rebel banner, because no one wants her for their queen." His eyes flicking gold in the fire, had softened, just slightly. "And it is protection for her too, which matters to me. A frightened realm wants the demon's daughter dead. But a realm gets used to things. Give it a few years of seeing her as the quiet loyal wife of its great hero, mother to his children, harmless, dutiful, ordinary—and the fear shall wear away. The stigma will fade. Married to you, she is safe, and in time she may even be happy, for I know you shall not harm her. Left alone as mad Stannis's mad daughter, she is a knife waiting on a frightened hand."
"Some may see it as a punishment," Jon had argued.
"All that matters is what you know it to be. The people will believe it as mercy. Some lords as cruelty." He'd shrugged, uncaring. "Let it be both if they wish. My mercy and my cruelty in a single stroke. Beloved as I am, there must still be reason to fear me."
They washed him clean and baptised him before the gods.
It was pure theatre from Joffrey, when all that was needed was a few words. But all the realm would remember this day, this sight at the end of the triumph parade.
So Jon knelt bareheaded on the sept steps while the High Septon and King Joffrey together anointed him with the seven oils, the sweet and the sharp, on the brow and the eyes and the lips and the breast, murmuring the prayers over him, and another septon poured holy water over his bowed dark head so that it ran down his face and dripped from his chin and soaked the collar of his tunic.
Washing away the bastard. Washing away the stain of it, sixteen years of it, the word that had walked behind him his whole life. Snow. The water ran off him and darkened the marble, and Jon knelt in it and thought, unbidden, of a cold morning at Winterfell a lifetime ago, and Lady Catelyn's eyes on him across the yard, and he found his own eyes stinging and told himself it was the oil.
Here dies the bastard, he thought, as the water ran. Let the lord be born.
"There's more to it than her," Jon had said, in the solar, unwilling to let it go. "Everything you've said—the marriage, the cooling of ardor—all of that you could have without ever revealing a thing. Why the truth, Joffrey? Why put it before the realm?"
The king had been quiet a moment.
"Because a buried truth is a buried blade, as you know." he'd said at last. "It waits. And one day an enemy digs it up and puts it in your back. If your parentage comes out in ten years from some other mouth, it's a scandal. A hidden dragon in the stag court. Proof that the honorable Ned Stark is a liar that might have been plotting who knows what. That's a knife in the dark." The King said, "But if I speak it, from the height of a triumph, wrapped in an oath of renunciation and a Baratheon marriage—then it is not a scandal. It is a reconciliation. The last dragon kneels to the stag and gives up his claim forever, of his own will, for love." He'd turned his cup slowly. "A blade in another man's hand can kill you, Jon. The same blade, taken up in your own, is only a tool. I would sooner draw this one myself, in the open, where every man can see it and see it laid down, than leave it buried in the dark for an enemy to find."
"And my descendants?" Jon had pressed. "Sworn oaths bind the man who swears them. My son's son may not feel your oath at all. In three generations there may be a Baratheon of Dragonstone with dragon's blood and old ambitions, and your line and mine may not be so fond as we are."
"What of Tommen's descendants, or Myrcella's or Renly's?" Joffrey laughed, and leaned back in his chair. Jon had no true answer for that, but that did not change the point. Seeing the words on his face, his friend sighed. "Fine, I'll humour you. Your grandson will first have to break a vow that the whole realm heard sworn," Joffrey had said. "Publicly. Before the gods. Every man in the Seven Kingdoms will know he is an oathbreaker before he raises a single banner, and men do not flock easily to oathbreakers. You'll have made it so his own blood is his shame, not his claim." He'd smiled thinly. "And if my descendants manage to lose the Iron Throne after everything I've built—after I've handed them a realm at peace, with our family name beloved, and a rival line sworn away on a golden platter—then frankly, cousin, they'll have earned the losing. I can armor my heirs. I cannot make them worthy. That much is on them."
He'd paused then, and the humor had gone out of his face, and he'd said the thing that Jon had turned over every hour since.
"And there is this. We have had no word of Viserys Targaryen, nor of the girl, Daenerys. They live, or they may not, somewhere east. And the Dothraki are stirring—raiding more than they have in years."
"Horse-lords raid," Jon had said, looking into the fire. "They are mongrels. It's their nature."
"So it is. Perhaps it means nothing." Joffrey had not sounded as though he believed it meant nothing. "Or perhaps someone is buying horses, and stirring the grass, and dreaming of a way across the water. I think it unlikely. I will not ignore it either way." Joffrey was looking at the dagger, his eyes narrowed. "One day a Targaryen may land on these shores with fire and blood and a foreign army, and cry that the realm's true king has come home. When that day comes, I should like the realm to have already seen a son of Rhaegar. A real one. Better loved than any exile—who knelt, and gave up his claim, and took the stag's name, and pledged his sword to the king. Set that against some silver-haired stranger off a boat, and tell me which one the lords believe."
Jon had had no answer for that.
"The loyalists have their dragon already," Joffrey had said. "He sits at my table, drinks my wine, gives me advice, does his best to bruise me in spars, and he is mine. That is worth more to me than you can know."
Jon had said nothing for a long while. Contemplating everything he knew.
"By taking the name Baratheon," Joffrey had finished, quietly, "you tell the realm there are no more dragons. Only stags. That the war is over, truly over, the last dragon folded into my house and my peace. One king. One family. One line. No more burnings, no more usurpers, no more claimants across the sea. Just the realm, whole, and at rest." He'd looked at Jon. "But I'll not force it on you, cousin. I forced Shireen to nothing, and I'll force you to nothing. Say no, and I'll legitimize you all the same, and never breathe a word of your father—you'll be Ser Jon still, a lord, my sworn man, and none the wiser. You needn't wed the girl. I shall find another for you, as big breasted as you wish—"Jon's lips twitched in spite of himself "—You needn't be a dragon before the realm. All of it is yours to refuse, and I'll think no less of you." A beat. "But I'm asking. Will you do it?"
And Jon had thought of the sad frightened little girl with no one left in the world. And he'd thought of Joffrey—beloved, blessed, the king the whole realm knew the gods had touched. And he'd thought of a voice in a dream, a three-eyed crow on his chest in the dark, protect the king, protect the king. And he'd thought of the black beach, Joffrey's warm voice in his head, calling his name, the fire in his hand, and the dawn.
They had come to the end, the last words, and Jon knelt to say them.
The washing was done, the water drying on his face, and the marriage was made, Shireen small and veiled at the edge of the steps with Ghost pressed white against her side.
The whole realm held its breath. Jon knelt before the king on the wet marble, bareheaded, and looked up into the golden face of the man he had chosen to serve, and spoke the oath they had made together, loud enough for the gods and the city both.
"Before the Seven, and before the realm, I swear it." His voice did not shake; he had made sure it would not. "I forsake my father. I abandon my name. For myself, and for all my blood that comes after, I give up every claim to the Iron Throne that draws from the dragon, now and unto the end of days." He drew breath. "I will be your sword, cousin. I will be your shield. I will make my purpose your glory, all my days, and my children's days, and theirs. This I swear, by the old gods and the new, on my life and my honor and my father's bones."
The plaza was silent as a sept. Jon took the king's hand and pressed his lips to the ring adorning his cousin's royal fingers.
Then King Joffrey reached down, and took Jon's hand, and his voice rang out over the whole of King's Landing, glad and golden and ringing like the sept bells themselves.
"Rise, Aemon of the House Baratheon. Rise brother, there are duties for you to fill." The king's hand was firm in his. "Rise cousin, there are honors for you to claim. Rise, my Lord of Dragonstone, my Lord Paramount of the Narrow Sea. Rise, as a trueborn son of a proud house, bastard no longer." The King's grip tightened, and he pulled, and Jon came up off the wet stone into the light with the water still shining on his face and the whole roaring realm rising with him. "Rise, Aemon. Rise, rise, rise."
CATELYN
The high table rested above the whole roaring hall, and Catelyn Stark sat at it and did not truly know what to feel.
She had feasted in this hall before of course, but tonight the air was different. The triumph had emptied the whole city into the streets and now it emptied the whole court into the Red Keep, and the great hall blazed with a thousand candles and a thousand different faces, and the noise rolled up against the high table in waves.
At the center of it sat the king and her daughter, Joffrey golden and Sansa auburn, their heads bent close. As Catelyn watched, the king said something low into her daughter's ear, and Sansa pressed her lips together and stared hard at something down the hall to keep from laughing. It had been wicked, whatever it was. The king had a way of being wicked that charmed rather than wounded, and under it Sansa had bloomed into a thing Catelyn still could not quite get used to seeing: a wife in love, and not afraid of her husband.
She is happy, Catelyn thought. That, at least, was a constant tonight.
The rest of the table sat less easy. Catelyn sat to the queen's right, with Ned beside her, quiet as ever. On the king's left sat the bastard—she would have to break the habit, he was Lord of Dragonstone now—and beside him his new child-wife, small and veiled.
Renly laughed and drank and told his tales, holding one arm a shade stiff; he and the king seemed the only two who belonged to the evening.
At the far end Lord Tywin ate little and said less, his pale eyes moving over the hall and the high table, always assessing. She watched them flicker between the king, her husband and the newly made Baratheon.
Catelyn turned her eyes away to find Arya fidgeting, scowling and picking at her food. She withheld a sigh. Tommen and Myrcella were too well-schooled to fidget and too young to hide that they longed to. Still. They at least tried. Catelyn put her mind from it and had another sip of wine.
The nobles came all night to pay their respects, a slow bright river of them. They came to the king and queen first, always, and Joffrey received each with that easy warmth of his and sent them off feeling they'd been marked out for it. But the river ran chiefly toward Jon.
Lord Jon. Lord Aemon. Lord of Dragonstone, son of Rhaegar, Lightbringer who ended the long night. Every lord and lady in the Seven Kingdoms wanted their moment with him, to converse and take his measure—the bastard dragon with the stag's name and the stag's colours.
He bore it the way he bore most things, gravely, a little stiff, plainly wishing himself gone. He had never learned to like being looked at. That much of the boy she knew was still in the man.
The child beside him shrank from every new face. Catelyn watched her flinch when Garth Tyrell boomed his good wishes at her, watched her small hands knot in her lap, watched her eyes keep going to her husband as if he were the one fixed thing in a room that spun.
A grey silk veil sat close about her head and beneath it the hair was growing back, a small mercy for the poor girl. Catelyn could not look at her and feel anything but pity.
Whatever Shireen Baratheon was, whatever had been done to her on that island, she was a child, alone, wed to a stranger before a hundred thousand eyes. Catelyn had daughters of her own. She could imagine them in her place, it left a pit in her stomach.
She had seen the girl in the sept, three mornings past. Catelyn had gone to pray—for her father at Riverrun, whose strength failed by the week; for her sister, who from the letters did not seem to be getting better; for her sons; for everything in her life—and Shireen had been there too, small in the great dimness beneath the Mother, her lips moving.
The women said she went often. They said a great many things about her, in the low voices they used when they thought no one who mattered was near: that she was cursed, that she had called the grey death down on all those men, that no natural child came out of a fire unburned, that she had lived only by the mercy of the Seven, because she shared the king's blood, and the gods would not suffer their beloved king's kin to burn.
Catelyn did not know which to believe, of the girl or the fire or the king. She had given up expecting to understand the king especially.
To her shame, Catelyn did little but drink through the feast. She knew she should speak to Ned. He sat close enough to touch, her husband of nearly twenty years, and there was a thing between them now the size of the Wall, and neither of them had found a way over it.
She held her tongue because she did not know how to begin. Every beginning she framed in her head turned to ash before it reached her mouth. And Ned held his because he was Ned. He would not bring it up over fish, with half the realm watching the high table and reading the words off their lips.
So they sat side by side in the silence, and let the feast roar around them.
Down the table, Catelyn saw Ser Loras Tyrell approach the king.
He came in his white cloak and he bent between Joffrey and Jon with the same easy insolence he had shown at Winterfell. Catelyn could not hear all of it over the din. But she saw Loras's grin, and caught fragments—how long, he was saying, how long were you too planning on keeping this from me?—and she saw Jon answer, and caught his words where she had missed the knight's: I swore a vow. And he worked the rest out on his own. A tilt of the head toward the king.
"Well," Loras said, loud enough now to carry, "you'll both be making it up to me for years." He looked at Jon, sly. "Must I call you Aemon now, my lord? Is that how it is?"
"Please don't." Jon groaned.
"Why not?" King Joffrey put in, "'Tis a fine name."
"He's not got the sword-arm to deserve so fine a name, nor the knightly graces neither." Loras smirked. "Aemon the Dragonknight you are decidedly not."
Jon lifted a finger, unhurried, and touched the small pale scar beneath his own right eye—the mark every man who had come home from that island wore, the king's own mark. "And where is yours, ser?"
Catelyn watched the barb go home. Loras's smirk curdled. "That is a low blow, my friend."
He had not been on Dragonstone. Loras had been new to the white cloak, and there had been six at the time. Having three away at war with only three guarding the king and his family would have been folly. It was the king who spoke up, laughing, waving a capon leg.
"Loras was where I needed him. Now, away with you, Ser, away—you're disturbing my new lord, and he's had trials enough today without you tramping on his triumph." The king was grinning. "Go and dance. Find some maiden to trouble instead."
Loras bowed and went, though he grumbled something at the bastard, who almost smiled. The king laughed again and clapped his good-brother—cousin, on the shoulder, and Catelyn watched the whole of it with a familiar old twist in her chest.
They had always been like that, those two.
It went back years, to when the prince first came to Winterfell as a sad boy of seven. Even then the prince had pulled Jon into the games he played with Robb, thrown an arm about the bastard's shoulders as though there were no wall in the world between a trueborn Stark heir and a nameless bastard boy.
Catelyn had watched it from her window and felt the old cold thing she had never quite been able to put down.
She had not hated him. She had told herself so, over the years, and mostly believed it. But he was always there—at her table, in her hall, a boy her honorable husband had got on some woman he would never name, kept under her roof where she must see him every day.
And the world had a way of lifting the bastard up. Every time she looked, Jon Snow had won some new thing. Off to King's Landing in the king's own train, the prince's chosen man. Then he returned knighted. And now this. Lightbringer. The hero of Dragonstone. A Lord with a castle, however destroyed, bearing dragons blood, however muddied, now married into the royal house.
The bastard had climbed higher than any child of her body, and done it without once putting a foot wrong.
She looked at him now, grave and stiff in his new lordship, his hand on his frightened child-wife's shoulder, and found the old resentment had gone out from under her like sand in a tide.
He was not Ned's shame. He was Lyanna's son. He was Ned's nephew, and for near seventeen years the boy she had frozen from her hearth had been the last living piece of the sister Ned had loved and buried, kept safe under her roof by a promise she never knew he made.
Catelyn had spent so long hating... She did not yet know what to do with the years, now that what they stood on was gone.
There was a small commotion, or the shadow of one, near the king's place.
A man had come to Joffrey's shoulder—not a lord, Catelyn thought; he had the look of a messenger or an upper servant, and hair of two colors, dark and pale mixed strangely together, so that she marked him without meaning to.
He bent and said something low into the king's ear. The king listened, his face smoothened as he thought, and he said a few words back. Catelyn caught only one word, before the man bowed and withdrew into the crowd.
"—Greyjoy."
Catelyn did not know what to make of that either, and there was no one to ask, and the feast rolled on.
It was late, and the dancing well begun, when the king came for her.
"Lady Catelyn." He stood before her with his hand out, golden and smiling, and the whole table turned to look. "Will you honor me? I've danced with my wife and my sister and half the realm it seems, but not once with the mother of my queen. It won't do."
There was no refusing a king. Catelyn rose, and gave him her hand, and let him lead her out among the turning couples.
He danced well, easily, as she remembered him doing at Winterfell. For a few turns he said nothing, only guided her through the figures, and Catelyn began to think he meant it as no more than a courtesy. Then he said, lightly:
"I know today's news came as a shock. To you most of all, I'd think."
"It was a shock, Your Grace." She chose her words with care. "A—a glad one."
"Was it?" He looked at her, and there was something knowing in the gold eyes, something that saw more than she wished it to. "You needn't perform gladness for me, good mother. I've enough of that at court to last three lifetimes. Speak plainly, if you can bear to. I find I like it, plain speech. It's rare enough that I've learned to treasure it, I would have it on my name day."
Catelyn did not want to speak plainly. But he was the king, and he had asked twice, and there was a directness in him that made evasion feel small.
"Then plainly, Your Grace." She thought of how to say it and then drew a breath. "Whatever anger I carried, these long years—it was never that my husband had a bastard. Lords have bastards. He might have had a dozen and I'd have borne it, as other women do—"
"—But he brought him home." The king said as he spun her.
"Yes." She confessed, and the words kept coming. "He was already there, in my new home, when I came from Riverrun. My husband's son by some woman he would never name. Ned never sent him away. Never spoke of the mother, not once, though I asked. He kept the boy under our roof and the silence around him like a wall, and I was meant to live beside both and say nothing." Her voice had gone tight. "That was the thing I could not forgive. Not the sin. The keeping of it, in my own house, where I had to see it every day."
"And now you know why he kept his silence," Joffrey said quietly.
"Now I know." She looked away, over his shoulder, at the candles. "It changes a great deal. It comes rather too late."
They turned through the figures a while without speaking.
"You must have been glad, then," the king said at last, "when Jon left Winterfell to come south with me. To have him gone from your table at last."
"It was not so simple as that." The words came before she could weigh them, and she saw him note it, that flicker of the gold eyes.
She should stop. She knew she should stop. But the wine was in her, and the strangeness of the day, and something about the king's steady listening drew the truth up out of her the way a poultice draws a wound.
She glanced past him—at Renly's dark Baratheon good looks, at the pale unburnt face of the child Shireen beneath her veil, at the king's own golden head—and the old fear rose in her, the one she had never spoken aloud to any living soul.
"Every child I bore my husband," she heard herself say, low, "came out a Tully. Auburn hair, blue eyes, the trout and not the wolf—every one, save Arya, who is Ned to the bone. Robb, Sansa, Bran, Rickon—Tully children, all. And the bastard—" she made herself say it "—Jon looked more a Stark than any of them. More trueborn than my own trueborn sons. A long Stark face, dark hair, grey eyes. Anyone who saw the children together saw it. The bastard looked the part, and mine did not."
"Ah, I see." said the king softly. She did not know if he did. Perhaps it did not matter.
"So no. I was not glad, not simply." Catelyn's chin came up. She had come this far. "I was afraid. I have been afraid for years, Your Grace, and I'll say it now since we are speaking plainly. A bastard who looks more Stark than my sons, gone south, grown great, become the friend of a king—I feared that one day Jon Snow and his sons might come north again, with the whole strength of the south at their backs, and take Winterfell from Robb. That the wolf's own seat might go to the boy who merely looked like a wolf, and my son be put aside." She held his eyes. "There. That is the plain truth of it. You asked for it."
She braced for him to laugh at her, or to dismiss her, gently or otherwise—to tell her it was a mother's foolish fretting, especially now, tonight, after what he had done.
He did not.
"That is an understandable fear," the king said.
Catelyn blinked. Of all the things she had thought he might say, agreement was not among them.
He saw her surprise—he saw quite a bit, she was learning—and one corner of his mouth turned up. "You expected me to wave it away."
"I did, Your Grace. Given—" she hardly knew how to say it "—given what you have done this very day. You have made Jon a great lord, and revealed his blood before the realm, and bound him to your house. I thought you would tell me such fears were nothing." She hesitated, then pressed on, because she had come this far. "Bastard blood is a tricky thing, they say. However diluted. However far removed. It does not always hold true to a vow, even a holy vow, even one sworn before all the realm. Sons are not their fathers. A promise made on these steps today may mean nothing to a grandson not yet born." She searched his face. "Does that not frighten you? What you have set loose?"
"No," the king said, honestly. "It doesn't."
And there was no bravado in it, no boy's boast. He seemed to look past her, out past the candles, out past the hall, to some distance Catelyn could not see.
"Life is too short to spend it fearing what may or may not come to pass long after I am dust," Joffrey said. "I have made the realm as safe as I know how to make it, against this and half a hundred other things. What my grandsons do with it—whether they grow cruel and are displaced, whether the small folk rise up—" Catelyn almost laughed in his face, the thought of such a thing was nearly too much, especially on this strange day but she held herself, barely, and knew she had drunk too much, "—or some far-off Baratheon of Dragonstone breaks an oath his great-grandfather swore—that is a trouble for men who will live in a world I'll never see." The gold eyes came back to her, and he smiled, but there was that same sadness she remembered in him as a boy. "The smallfolk have started to believe I'm something more than a man, did you know? Blessed. Chosen. An old cripple called me 'the Father's Son' and begged for my blessing. They can believe what gives them peace. But I know what I am, my lady. I remember. I am a man, and men are mortal, and for all the songs they're singing tonight, I could walk out of this hall and cross the yard or the streets of the city, and drop down dead on the stones for no reason at all. Any of us could. So I do not spend the little life I have fearing much, especially not the distant future. I live the day I'm given. It's the only one I am promised."
Catelyn did not fully understand him. There was something under the words, some private knowledge or grief she could not reach, and she had the sudden uneasy sense of a man much older than his years looking out at her through a boy's golden face.
The song ended.
"Thank you for the dance, good-mother," the king said, and bowed over her hand, warm and courteous once more, the strangeness folded away as quickly as it had shown. "And for the plain speech. It was a gift; I know what it cost you." He straightened, and his eyes went across the hall to Sansa. "Now if you'll forgive me—I've a wife to dance with, and I find I never like to go too long without her."
And he was gone, back to her daughter, and Catelyn stood a moment among the dancers, more unsettled than the wine could account for.
It was very late when she and Ned came at last to their own chambers.
The fire had been banked low and the noise of the feast was a dim thing through the thick stone, and for a moment they only stood there, the two of them, in the quiet they had not managed to fill all night. Then Catelyn turned to her husband.
"My Lord, I am sorry."
"You've nothing to be sorry for." He said it at once, roughly. "Cat. Look at me. You had every right to feel as you felt, all these years. I gave you a bastard to raise beside your own children and I never gave you a word of reason for it. The fault was mine. It was always mine. Not yours."
"But he wasn't yours." Her voice caught. "That's what I—Ned, all these years I thought you had— and you let me think it. You let the whole world think it, that you had dishonored me, dishonored yourself, and it was a lie, and you carried the shame of a lie all these years rather than—"
"Rather than break a promise to Lyanna. Aye." His grey eyes were steady on her. "I did."
"I understand why you couldn't tell me at first." She had to get it out now, all of it. "We were strangers, near enough. Wed a fortnight and you off to war, and when you came back you came back with him, and how could you have trusted a wife you barely knew with a thing that could get the boy killed? I understand that. But Ned—sixteen years. After everything. After all we built. You could have told me."
"I could have." He did not flinch from it. "I thought on it, more than once. And every time I thought the same thing—that a secret is safest with one man, and that if you knew, you'd be in the danger too. Robert would have killed the boy, Cat. He might have killed me too, for allowing him in his halls. You know he would have. Rhaegar's son, at his own hearth—he'd have called it mercy and smashed his head against the wall. As long as no one knew but me, no one could betray it, not even by accident, not under torture, not in their sleep. I kept it from you to keep you safe from it." He looked away, into the low fire. "And then time passed and the danger seemed to shrink, and there was no need to speak of it. And the longer I held my tongue the harder it grew to break so old a silence. There was no better reason. Only that, and habit, and time."
Catelyn crossed to him and took his hands.
"No more of it," she said. "No more secrets between us, Ned. Not ever again. I mean it. I have carried enough of your silences to last me."
"There are no more." He pressed her hands. "That was the last of them, and the deepest. There's nothing left I haven't told you."
She searched his face, and believed him, and something in her that had been clenched for all these years let go.
Later they lay together in bed, wrapped around each other, still heady and flushed from their coupling and the wine.
"Have you decided?" she asked, her fingers moving on his chest. "About coming home. With me, and Arya, and Rickon. Winterfell needs its lord, Ned. Robb is doing well—better than well—but he's young, and the North is wide, and I want you home." She paused. "I want us home."
"I'll come north," Ned said. "Soon. There's a thing I must see done first—the king will need my help finding my own replacement, a new Hand who'll serve him well, and I'll not leave the office to just any man. Joffrey's been good to our house. More than good. I'll do that much for him before I go."
Catelyn could understand that. A princess's dowry would have beggared the North and left them praying to survive the winter. But the king had been generous — he had asked a sum they could bear, and in place of the rest he had struck a bargain. For every five ships the Manderlys laid down in White Harbor, two would be the crown's. The North had little gold to give, but it had timber, especially by the wall, and shipwrights, and a deep cold harbor. In a few years the crown would have a fleet built in the North, and White Harbor would grow fat on the building of it and the nights watch would be able to generate some extra coin. It was a worthwhile agreement for all.
Ned squeezed her hand. "But then I'm for home. I've had my fill of the south. I want to die in the North, Cat, in my own hall, under my own weirwood. Not here, in all this heat and gold and whispering."
"Then we'll go together." She leaned her head against his shoulder. "We'll stop at Riverrun on the way. I want to see Lysa and Father, while there's still—" She could not finish it.
"How is he?" Ned asked gently. He spoke not of her sister. He did not like to remember what her grief had insinuated and nearly forced him to do. "Any better?"
"No." The word was small. "No better. He fades, Ned. The maester's letters grow shorter each time, and kinder, which is worse. But we'll stop, and I'll sit with him, and Edmure will be glad of us." She closed her eyes. A year ago she had known exactly what her life was, and what it would be until she died.
But then the king had ridden north. Her sister had gone mad and nearly thrown herself from atop the Eyrie. Her daughter was a queen. The bastard was a dragon. Her father was dying and her sons were growing, and the whole course of her life had been lifted out of its old channel and set running somewhere she could not see the end of. "So much has changed," she said. "In a year. Only a year. I hardly know my own life anymore."
"Aye," said Ned, and put his arm around her, and they watched the fire burn down, two people who had, at the last, no more secrets between them.
Outside, faint through the stone, the feast still sang the triumph of the peerless and the striking down of a demon.